Amid Iraq clashes, premier sees unity

Iraqis survey the damage Wednesday from a deadly car bomb that was set off the day before in the Sadr City area of Baghdad, which is inhabited primarily by Shiites.
Iraqis survey the damage Wednesday from a deadly car bomb that was set off the day before in the Sadr City area of Baghdad, which is inhabited primarily by Shiites.

BAGHDAD -- Iraqi security forces battled Sunni insurgents targeting the country's main oil refinery and said they regained partial control of a city near the Syrian border Wednesday, as Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki reached out in a televised address to try to regain support from the nation's disaffected Sunnis and Kurds.

The U.S. has been pressing al-Maliki to adopt political inclusion and undermine the insurgency by making overtures to Iraq's once-dominant Sunni minority, which has long complained of discrimination by his government and abuses by his Shiite-led security forces.

In Washington, President Barack Obama briefed leaders of Congress on options for quelling the al-Qaida-inspired insurgency and told the lawmakers that he won't need congressional approval for the actions he's considering.

Al-Maliki, a Shiite, has rejected claims of bias against Iraq's Sunnis and Kurds and has in recent days been stressing that the threat posed by the militant Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant will affect all Iraqis regardless of their ethnic or religious affiliations. He also rejects any suggestion that the Islamic State and other extremist groups enjoy support from disaffected Sunnis fed up with his perceived discrimination.

Al-Maliki expressed optimism in a televised address Wednesday over what he called the rise by all of Iraq's political groups to the challenge of defending the nation against the militant threat.

The crisis has led Iraqis to rediscover "national unity," he said.

"I tell all the brothers there have been negative practices by members of the military, civilians and militiamen, but that is not what we should be discussing," al-Maliki said. "Our effort should not be focused here and leave the larger objective of defeating ISIL."

Al-Maliki's address came as the military said government forces repelled repeated attacks on the country's largest oil refinery and retook parts of the strategic city of Tal Afar, near the Syrian border.

Refinery workers, eyewitnesses and an Iraqi army officer reported the seizure of the refinery by Sunni extremists on Wednesday after army helicopter gunships failed to repel the attack. But other Iraqi officials said fighting was still going on inside the compound of the facility, which had been shut down by the violence.

The chief military spokesman, Lt. Gen. Qassim al-Moussawi, said Iraqi army troops had defended the refinery and that 40 attackers were killed there overnight and early Wednesday.

An employee at the oil refinery said late Wednesday that the facility remained in government hands, though one of its fuel tanks was on fire after it was apparently hit by a mortar shell fired by the militants. He spoke on condition of anonymity in exchange for discussing the situation there.

A government official in Beiji and the army commander in charge of defending the refinery also insisted that Iraqi authorities were still in control, although they conceded that militant fighters had invaded the facility and controlled two of the four main entrances.

The Beiji refinery accounts for a little more than a quarter of the country's entire refining capacity -- all of which goes toward domestic consumption for things like gasoline, cooking oil and fuel for power stations. Any lengthy halt in refining at Beiji risks long lines at the gas pump and electricity shortages.

Oil companies Exxon Mobil and BP began removing employees in Iraq on Wednesday, though the companies and the government have said Iraq's output of almost 3 million barrels of oil a day should remain unaffected by the fighting in the country. Companies such as Chevron, Total and Marathon Oil, which are drilling in the Kurdistan region, are continuing to operate.

Meeting with lawmakers

Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari said Wednesday that his country had formally asked the U.S. to launch airstrikes against positions of the Islamic State.

Gen. Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, confirmed that the U.S. had received a request for air power to stop the militants, but he highlighted the uncertain political situation in Iraq.

"The entire enterprise is at risk as long as this political situation is in flux," he told a Senate panel Wednesday. He added that some Iraqi security forces had backed down when confronted by the militants because they had "simply lost faith" in the central government in Baghdad.

White House officials said Obama has made no decisions about how to respond to the crumbling security situation. They said Obama has shifted his focus away from airstrikes as an immediate option, in part because there are few clear targets the U.S. could hit.

Obama briefed lawmakers Wednesday afternoon on the options he's considering.

"The president basically just briefed us on the situation in Iraq and indicated he didn't feel he had any need for authority from us for steps that he might take and indicated he would keep us posted," Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky said after leaving the White House.

McConnell and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., refused to say what potential responses the president discussed in the meeting.

House Speaker John Boehner of Ohio and House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi of California joined McConnell and Reid at the meeting. "The president's going to keep us as informed as he can as the process moves forward," Reid said.

Pelosi said in a statement after the meeting that she agreed that Obama does not need "any further legislative authority to pursue the particular options for increased security assistance discussed today." She did not specify what options were discussed.

Administration officials have suggested that the president may be able to act on his own because Iraq's government has requested U.S. military assistance.

In addition, an authorization for the use of military force in Iraq, passed by Congress in 2002, is still on the books and could be used as a rationale for the White House acting without additional approval. Before the outburst of violence in Iraq, Obama had called for that authorization to be repealed.

Dempsey told a Senate subcommittee earlier that the military is "developing a full range of options" for confronting the Islamic State. He signaled that airstrikes aren't imminent and would require better intelligence on ground targets.

"These forces are very much intermingled," Dempsey said. "It's not as easy as looking at an iPhone video of a convoy and then immediately striking."

Dempsey cited the case of an Iraqi army base in Mosul that was taken over by the Sunni militants, who then were ousted by Kurdish peshmerga forces.

"So in the course of about 36 hours, we had Iraqi army units, we had ISIL and then we had the peshmerga in that same facility," Dempsey said. "And until we can actually clarify this intelligence picture, the options will continue to be built and developed and refined and the intelligence picture made more accurate and then the president can make a decision."

The U.S. has manned and unmanned aircraft in the region, and Obama notified Congress that he's sending as many as 275 military personnel into Iraq to protect the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad and other diplomatic installations.

But some lawmakers in Congress have been calling for the U.S. to do more, short of calling for a deployment of troops.

Republican Rep. Ed Royce of California, the House Foreign Affairs Committee chairman, criticized Obama's deliberative pace.

"Having failed to act months ago with drone strikes -- as repeatedly requested by the Iraqi government -- it is clear that the Obama administration is struggling to respond to this urgent situation," Royce said.

Other Republicans continued to insist Wednesday that Obama bore the blame for allowing the insurgency to strengthen because of his decision to withdraw U.S. forces from Iraq in late 2011 after more than eight years of war. Washington and Baghdad failed to reach a security agreement that would have allowed American forces to stay longer.

"What's happening in Iraq is a direct result of the president's misguided decisions," said Rep. Duncan Hunter, R-Calif., a Marine reservist who served two combat tours in Iraq. "Militarily, the U.S. won in Iraq, but the hard-fought and hard-earned gains of our servicemen and women have been politically squandered by the president and his administration."

A U.N. call for unity

The Iraqi crisis's growing sectarian nature -- which al-Maliki vehemently denies -- caught the attention of U.N. chief Ban Ki-moon.

In a message to the Organization of Islamic Cooperation Council meeting Wednesday in Jiddah, Saudi Arabia, he called on Iraq's leaders "to come together and agree on a national security plan to address the terrorist threat from ISIL."

"The rapidly deteriorating security situation in Iraq is deeply alarming and increases the sectarian tensions in the region," Ban said. "It is imperative that acts of reprisal be avoided as they can only intensify the cycle of violence."

The campaign by the Islamic State militants has raised the specter of the sectarian warfare that nearly tore the country apart in 2006 and 2007.

The Islamic State has vowed to march to Baghdad and the Shiite holy cities of Karbala and Najaf, home to some of the sect's most revered shrines. The militants also have tried to capture Samarra, a city north of Baghdad and home to another major Shiite shrine.

Thousands of Shiites have volunteered to defend the shrines, including volunteers from Iran. Iran's President Hassan Rouhani told a crowd Wednesday at a stadium near the Iraq border: "We declare ... that the great Iranian nation will not miss any effort in protecting these sacred sites."

Al-Maliki has rejected the notion that the crisis is sectarian in nature. He has insisted that a call to arms by the Iranian-born Shiite Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani was for all Iraqis, and claimed, without producing evidence, that those who responded included Sunnis.

But earlier this week, Shiite militiamen were accused of killing nearly four dozen Sunni detainees, and the bullet-riddled bodies of four young Sunnis were discovered in a Shiite neighborhood of Baghdad.

On Wednesday, a bomb blast killed four and wounded 11 in the mostly Sunni district of Ghazaliyah in western Baghdad.

Meanwhile, the government of India said 40 Indian construction workers had been seized near Iraq's second-largest city, Mosul, which Sunni fighters captured last week.

The Turkish Foreign Ministry said its diplomats were also investigating a Turkish media report that militants grabbed 60 foreign construction workers, including some 15 Turks, near the northern Iraqi oil city of Kirkuk.

Ethnic Kurds now control Kirkuk, moving to fill a vacuum after the flight of Iraqi soldiers. They too are battling the Sunni extremist militants.

Information for this article was contributed by Hamza Hendawi, Sameer N. Yacoub, Qassim Abdul-Zahra, Katy Daigle, Julie Pace, Bradley Klapper and Suzan Fraser of The Associated Press; by Kathleen Hunter, Margaret Talev, Tony Capaccio, Roger Runningen, David Lerman, Derek Wallbank, Nayla Razzouk, Bradley Olson, Kadhim Ajrash, Khalid Al-Ansary and James Herron of Bloomberg News; and by Dan Bilefsky, Rod Nordland, Suadad Al-Salhy, Rick Gladstone and staff members of The New York Times.

A Section on 06/19/2014

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